A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open-source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open-source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay $5 million for the infringement.

Well, looking into a Hash table, then chaining to solve collisions : isn't that existing since the early 80's ???
I mean, any simple LZ77 compressor does exactly that, and that was way before 1997. How come such a "method" be patented in 1997 ? Prior art doesn't mean anything ?